Monday, June 03, 2013

Classless

[Update, Tuesday, 2.32: I just received the following comment from Kevin Best, UNC's assistant athletic director for communications:

"We have spoken with Alec and he would like to apologize to Duke and the men’s lacrosse team for his inappropriate tweet. It was in poor taste and should not have been made. He removed it shortly after it was posted.

The University of North Carolina congratulates Duke on winning the NCAA men's lacrosse title."

I am grateful to Mr. Best for his reply.]

The on-campus crusade against the 2006 Duke lacrosse team
was something of a perfect storm. The critical element was the
race/class/gender-obsessed faculty that made up the bulk of the Group of 88. A president
unable or unwilling to confront the faculty mob was a necessary ingredient. But
the anti-lacrosse contingent also included professors who sought to exploit the
affair as part of a longstanding campaign to downgrade the role of athletics at
Duke. Figures such as anti-lacrosse fanatic Orin Starn and Peter Wood, whose
CCI recommendations for Duke sports were far too extreme even for the Brodhead
administration, typified this faction.

Not all universities, then or now, have presidents as
cowardly as Richard Brodhead. Unlike Duke, most other universities would have
had at least a few voices willing to speak up against the mob from the start.
And, perhaps, “activist” faculty at some other universities might have been
savvy enough to once reference the presumption of innocence in their public
statements, even if they didn’t really mean it. Otherwise, however, I suspect
that if the Duke lacrosse case had occurred at Harvard or Cornell or Georgetown
or UNC, we would have seen a similar faculty reaction—race/class/gender
professors combining with anti-athletics faculty members to exploit the crisis
for their own campus agendas.

Perhaps this recognition that their own school’s faculty mob
just as easily could have turned against them prompted a degree of empathy from
college athletes and coaches at other schools. Stray comments like this
one from Dom Starsia stood out from the crowd in this respect.

I e-mailed UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham to ask if
UNC had a social media policy for its athletes and whether Petrocelli’s words
reflected the athletic department’s values. Cunningham did not reply at the time of this post (I had e-mailed him more than 100 hours before the post went live), but the athletic department has since issued a statement, which I included above, in its entirety.*

Given that his e-mail makes sense only if he believed a rape occurred in 2006, Petrocelli is, to put it mildly, classless; he subsequently deleted
his Twitter account. But
the statement provides only the latest reminder that there will always be a
segment of society that believes the version of events offered by Mike Nifong
and the Durham Police Department, regardless of evidence.

As things stand now, the DPD will likely never be held
accountable. The 4th Circuit decision, which largely neutered the
lawsuit against Durham, has been appealed to the Supreme Court. (The cert
petition filing notice is here.) From a practical standpoint, it’s hard to
imagine four justices granting cert: Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor would seem
to sympathize with Judge Gregory’s race-based perspective of U.S. law, and Justices Roberts and Alito
tend to adopt reflexively pro-government positions on criminal justices issues.
Assuming (a big assumption) that Justices Scalia and Thomas would vote to grant
cert, the falsely accused players would then need the votes of Justices Kennedy
and one Democratic appointee just to get the case before the Court.

I don't think that he was 'classless' for referring to an incident that Duke never admitted didn't occur; a little uninformed, maybe. Besides, why use a harsh term to discribe an action that indicates a student's free expression when we have the president of Swarthmore college recently accepting students' on-campus 'classless' behavior as being perfectly acceptable. Big Al

The tweet was just a minor attempt at humor of the kind commonly made by college students; thoughtless, but that's more or less what "sophomore" means.(not to be taken too seriously...)

(btw, what happened when a lacrosse player sent a joke email which spoofed American Psycho? That was dismissedas just a typical college spoof, wasn't it?

You couldn't imagine that a judge on a federal appeals bench would still be referring to it as though it had not been a spoof and somehow said something about the nature of the lacrosse plaintiffs, could you?)

"Mr. Van de Velde’s long legal battle to clear his name has taken many turns, and now has reached something of a conclusion. On Monday, he, Yale and the City of New Haven said they had reached a settlement over his lawsuit, which claimed that Yale and New Haven wrongly singled him out, and that his reputation and health had been damaged." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/nyregion/james-van-de-velde-from-pariah-back-to-pillar.html?_r=0

"In 2003, Brodhead was named a defendant along with, Richard Levin, Linda Lorimer in a lawsuit by Yale professor James Van de Velde claiming damage of reputation after Van de Velde was accused of murdering Suzanne Jovin, a female student, and Brodhead subsequently canceled his class citing his presence as a "major distraction.'" (Wikipedia)

I'm sure that the tweet was a sophomoric attempt at humor. On the issue of taking it seriously, I referenced it only for what it says: that the "humor" makes no sense unless the author of the tweet believed that a rape occurred. In this respect, the tweet serves as a reminder of the continuing damages of the allegations against the falsely accused players. (I don't see a comparison to the McFadyen email in this regard.) That such a tweet came from a fellow athlete makes it more difficult to understand.

To the 8.43:

While I have been very critical of the current Swarthmore administration (http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/04/swarthmore_occidental_and_thei.html), events on that campus don't seem to have much to do, one way or the other, with Mr. Petrocelli.

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I am from Higgins Beach, in Scarborough, Maine, six miles south of Portland. After spending five years as track announcer at Scarborough Downs, I left to study fulltime in graduate school, where my advisor was Akira Iriye. I have a B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard, and an M.A. from the University of Chicago. At Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, I teach classes in 20th century US political, constitutional, and diplomatic history; in 2007-8, I was Fulbright Distinguished Chair for the Humanities at Tel Aviv University.

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"From the Scottsboro Boys to Clarence Gideon, some of the most memorable legal narratives have been tales of the wrongly accused. Now “Until Proven Innocent,” a new book about the false allegations of rape against three Duke lacrosse players, can join these galvanizing cautionary tales . . , Taylor and Johnson have made a gripping contribution to the literature of the wrongly accused. They remind us of the importance of constitutional checks on prosecutorial abuse. And they emphasize the lesson that Duke callously advised its own students to ignore: if you’re unjustly suspected of any crime, immediately call the best lawyer you can afford."--Jeffrey Rosen, New York Times Book Review